war widows – Dr Nadine Leese

Listen to the Voices of War’s Forgotten Women

05/05/2018

War Widows’ Stories captures the lives of war’s forgotten women past and present through oral history, participatory arts, public events, and archival research. The British public commonly imagine war widows to be elderly women who lost their husbands as a result of active combat in the Second World War, surrounded and supported by family, friends, the armed forces, and the state. While this applies to some women, it by no means describes the majority of Britain’s 18,950 war widows.

British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award for War Widows’ Stories

23/04/2018

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I’m excited to announce that I’ve been selected for one of the British Academy’s Rising Star Engagement Awards (BARSEA). These awards are granted to “some of the most promising and talented academics in the UK” and “are designed to encourage wider engagement with the humanities and social sciences within and beyond academia”. With an application endorsed by […]

War Widows’ Stories Launches Live on Woman’s Hour

10/01/2017

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On 11 November 2016, Mary Moreland and I launched the Heritage Lottery Funded project War Widows’ Stories live on Woman’s Hour. We were given eight star-struck minutes with BBC Radio 4’s Jenni Murray, and you can listen to the result below via BBC iPlayer. It’s needless to say I was so excited about being able […]

[Funding] Heritage Lottery Funds War Widows’ Stories

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I’m really pleased to say that I’ve been awarded my first external grant since my PhD. It’s not exactly news anymore by now, but last semester was so busy that I just couldn’t find the time to record things as they were happening. I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few years thinking […]

Women On Their Own: Widows in Britain, Now & Then

13/10/2015

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As part of my role as one of this year’s New Generation Thinkers, I’ve recorded an edition of BBC Radio 3’s The Essay! “Women on Their Own: Widows in Britain, Now & Then” will be broadcast on 11 November 2015 at 10.45PM, and you can listen anytime after this by visiting BBC iPlayer. [iframe http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06ns10j 900 […]

[Commentary] “Widows Are Wonderful” (1917): A Musical Find from the First World War

17/01/2015

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While researching the introduction to my book on the widow in British literature and culture, I stumbled across a tune from the First World War which illustrates perfectly some of the attributes which have rendered the figure of the widowed woman a popular and loaded one here in Britain, not only since the Victorian period […]

[Commentary] The Widow & the Law: A Brief History of Widows’ Pensions in Britain

20/08/2014

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At a time when we remember the First World War, its victims, and its survivors, it seems apt for me to share some of the research I’ve been doing on the literary and cultural history of the widow in Britain, and particularly on how the state’s support and the economic conditions of widowed women has changed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and reflects both Britain’s development in terms of gender equality as well as the emergence of the welfare state.